Do you use <object> functionality in your web application? Do you support Microsoft Internet Explorer?
If so, you might want to take a look at this: Microsoft’s Active X D-Day, which details Microsoft’s plans to change IE to deal with the Eolas lawsuit. Apparently the update won’t be critical, but eventually will be rolled into every version of IE.
Here’s a bit more technical explanation of what how to fix object embedding from Microsoft, and a bit of history from 2003.
Via Mezzoblue.
You know what, coding is hard. You’re balancing shifting requirements, a constant stream of new technologies and a hot cup of coffee, all while trying to keep up with your flood of email. When you actually get a minute to code, you sometimes don’t know where to start. Testing is important, but often gets shoved to the bottom of the priority list. This makes for some … interesting code. I love having my code reviewed, but it’s always a humbling experience.
That’s why The Daily WTF resonates with me. You know what? I’m self taught, so I probably have written code that bad. I just hope it wasn’t code someone paid me for. But even in my professional life, I’m sure I’ve written code that caused someone maintaining it later to yell ‘WTF’. Never Vector Oriented Programming, but I have been accused of using HashMap Oriented Programming.
Apart from mistakes anyone beginning could make, there are also folks (we’ve all met them) who just shouldn’t be coding. That’s where this site truly shines: gobs of examples. The Brillant Paula is one great one, among others.
This site is humbling and astonishing. It reminds me of the old chestnut: if your computer was a car; software ‘engineering’ has a long way to go before it truly becomes engineering.
I wrote a while back about building your own geocoding engine. The Tiger/Line dataset has some flaws as a geocoding service, most notably that once you get out of urban areas many addresses simply cannot be geocoded.
Recently, I was sent a presentation outlining other options (pdf) which seems to be a great place to start an evaluation. The focus is on Lousiana–I’m not sure how the conclusions would apply to other states’ data.
The JavaRanch Journal has a new newsletter out; one of the articles is an interesting look at some of the new, advanced ‘enterprise’ features of Ant. This is just part one of the series by Ajith Kallambella; I’ll be keeping my eyes out for the next parts.
Congratulations to Kevin Cawley, whose mobile products company has been acquired by Newsgator. I know Kevin peripherally (we talked about J2ME once or twice) and wish him luck in his new job.
Folks whose opinion I respect really like Newsgator for RSS aggregation; it’ll be interesting to see how they react when Outlook 12 is released with RSS aggregation built in.
I changed the Movable Type template to include full content on feeds. Sorry for the disruption (it may have made the last fifteen entries appear new).
I think sending full content in the feeds (both RSS1 and RSS2) goes nicely with the Yahoo Ads I added a few months ago. Folks who actually subscribe to what I say shouldn’t have to endure ads, while those who find the entries via a search engine can endure some advertising. (Russell Beattie had a much slicker implementation of this idea a few years ago.)
More about the ads: I think that they’re not great, but I think that’s due to my relative lack of traffic–because of the low number of pageviews, Yahoo just doesn’t (can’t) deliver ads that are very targeted. (I’ve seen a lot of ‘Find Dan Moore’). It’s also a beta service (ha, ha). Oh well–it has paid me enough to go to lunch (but I’ll have to wait because they mail a check only when you hit $100).
As long as we’re doing public service announcements, I’ve decided to turn off comments (from the initial post, rather than only on the old ones). Maybe it’s because I’m posting to thin air, or because I’m not posting on inflammatory topics, or because comment spam is so prevalent, but I’m not getting any comments anymore (I think 5 in the last 6 months). So, no more comments.
And that’s the last blog about this blog you’ll see, hopefully for another year.
Here is a new blog on information technology and public policy blog that I’ve started reading. It’s an interesting concept–each student is required to write once a week, guests are welcome to chime in (you can even follow along with the reading list, should you choose to do so), and the posts seem to be well thought out. I found the post titledFile-sharing, Market Impact and Consumer Welfare to be particularly interesting.
This is a graduate course at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, graduates of which include Samual Alito, Bill Frist, Eliot Sptizer and others. So the folks writing these opinions have, at the least, an opportunity to become a mover and shaker.
Via Freedom to Tinker.
As I mentioned I might do in passing here, I’ve updated my Boulder Cross Country Ski information page with a map of trailheads. Incidentally, the above post was also mentioned in a blog roundup on Google Maps Mania a few weeks back.
Here’s an old but fantastic post about API (mis)design.
To handle an exception, you have four choices, one of which is:
Log it! We bought big hard disks for those servers, let’s use them! Log the exception toString() and print its stack trace, but only if you expect the exception to be thrown over 1,000,000 times each day. Alternatively, if you think that the exception would only occur rarely and that it could indicate a problem worth looking at, just print the exception class name … since stack traces just confuse people!
Hilarious. And, it looks like it’s part 4 of a 7 part series. Via Dejan Bosanac.
Follow me on Twitter
Follow me on Blue Sky